Data center cooling has become a problem of increasing interest as the number of servers and the power each server consumes has been rapidly increasing to meet the increasing demands of computation, transaction processing, telecommunications, and interne usage. With rising energy costs and new incentives for “green” energy use, efficiency has become an important issue.
Data centers are often cooled using air conditioning units or ACUs. Typically, data centers are over-provisioned with ACUs where the capacity of the ACUs far exceeds the cooling needs of the data center. Operating too many ACUs in the data center wastes enormous amounts of energy and adds to the heat load of the data center.
Therefore, techniques for regulating ACU usage in a data center to minimize or eliminate wasteful over-provisioning of cooling and thereby increasing efficiency the data center cooling system would be desirable.